Yes I know people using an AMD Athlon processor should not in any stretch of the imagination anyone using a processor like the Athlon64 6000+ should be using Windows 10, but given how Microsoft was going so far as to operate borderline illegally to get it out there, it's not surprising. And since these people are also using the Home version, which forces patches down your throat even if they are installed because of problems, they're caught in a nightmare cycle.
Windows Meltdown-Spectre update: Some AMD PC owners post crash reports | ZDNet Microsoft's Windows patch for the Meltdown and Spectre attack methods is reportedly causing problems for users with AMD Athlon CPUs. According to a number of complaints on Microsoft's community forum, the problems are appearing on Athlon systems that received the update for the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update, labelled KB4056892. The initial reporter said after installing the update the PC only displayed the Windows logo and otherwise failed to boot. The update was delivered through Windows Update. "After several failed boots [it does] a rollback and [then] it shows error 0x800f0845. Unfortunately, it seems it's not easy to disable the automatic updates without gpedit tweaks, so it tries installing and rolling back the update over and over," wrote the reporter. It's not clear how widespread this issue is, but the reporter noted that the CPU involved is "quite pre-historic", specifically the AMD Athlon X2 6000+, which was released a decade ago. Others who report the same issue are also using older AMD chips. It's also not certain that Microsoft's patches for the Meltdown and Spectre attacks are the actual cause of the problems, given KB4056892 contains much more than these specific security fixes. Microsoft hasn't responded specifically to the reports yet, instead issuing a general statement relating to the Meltdown and Spectre problem. |
UPDATE: Microsoft has blamed AMD for the issues, and has suspended all updates to those machines (since everything is rolled into one package). Yet another reason why bundled patches is a massively bad idea.
https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/3024061/microsofts-withdraws-spectre-and-meltdown-patch-th...
MICROSOFT HAS POINTED the finger of blame in the direction of AMD after update designed to protect against the recent Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities started bricking machines using the company's processors. Customers with AMD chips, the second biggest group after Intel, were finding themselves unable to get past the splash screen in Windows 10 after the patch was applied. But of course, nothing is ever Microsoft's fault, hence: "Microsoft has reports of customers with some AMD devices getting into an unbootable state after installing recent Windows operating system security updates," the company claimed. "After investigating, Microsoft has determined that some AMD chipsets do not conform to the documentation previously provided to Microsoft to develop the Windows operating system mitigations to protect against the chipset vulnerabilities known as Spectre and Meltdown. "To prevent AMD customers from getting into an unbootable state, Microsoft will temporarily pause sending the following Windows operating system updates to devices with impacted AMD processors at this time." Of course, lest we forget, because Microsoft rolls up a lot of its security updates into fun-sized bundles of bork this also means it has had to pull some other stuff from AMD machines as well. So that's fun. |
